Today, many types of aircraft, such as airplanes, helicopters, “wing in ground effect” (WIG) craft, gyrocopters, hovercraft, powered parachutes, etc. exist Some of these such as airplanes and helicopters are in widespread commercial use. However, no one type of aircraft has gained widespread personal use compared to the widespread use of other personal vehicles such as automobiles, motorcycles, snowmobiles, or personal watercraft. Well-known reasons such as high costs, extensive training requirements, limited accessibility, operating space requirements, and perceived safety risk account for the lack of widespread personal use of such aircraft.
Currently, the most commonly used vertical take-off or landing (VTOL) aircraft are helicopters and hovercrafts. However, these aircraft also have a number of well-known disadvantages, which have prevented their widespread use as a personal use aircraft.
As evidenced by the many prior-art patents on the subject, there has been a great deal of effort to develop a safe, inherently stable, compact, economical, easily portable, easily storable, easy-to-use, low-altitude flight-capable VTOL human/cargo transporter. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 2,953,321 to Robertson et. al. describes unique flying craft that was developed by the Hiller Helicopter Corporation in the 1950's, and became known as the Hiller Flying Platform. The Hiller flying Platform had limited technical success and was never commercialized.
Several other concepts exist for personal flying machines and/or unmanned aerial vehicles (that might be adapted for carrying people), which could be classed as “flying platform” craft. As described, these craft were supposedly capable of vertical takeoff and landing and free flight. Some of these concepts are described in the following US patents: U.S. Pat. No. 4,0043,421 “Air Car”; U.S. Pat. No. 4,47,024 “Airborne Vehicle”; U.S. Pat. No. 4,537,372 “VTOL Aircraft”; U.S. Pat. No. 5,026,002 “Helihover Amphibious Aircraft”; U.S. Pat. No. 5,152 478 “Unmanned Flight Vehicle etc.”; U.S. Pat. No. 5,178,344 “VTOL Aircraft”; U.S.Pat. No. 5,738,302 “Airborne Vehicle”; U.S. Pat. No. 5,803,199 “Lift Augmented Ground Effect Platform”; U.S. Pat. No. 6,082,478 “Lift Augmented Ground Effect Platform”; “Personal Air Transport”;; U.S. Pat. No. 6,464,459 “Lifting Platform With Energy Recover”. None of these craft concepts have been successful commercially, particularly in regards to being applied to a personal use aircraft.
To develop the invention claimed herein, the applicant has carried out extensive scale model testing of the inventive concepts described in some of the above-listed patents. However, the applicant was unable to experimentally substantiate the operating performance claimed in these patents because of fundamental flaws in the designs or underlying theories of the competing inventive concepts.
There is therefore a need for a personal aircraft which is capable of taking off and landing almost anywhere, is easy to fly, requires only minimal training to be operated safely, can be operated over any terrain, is inherently stable, is inherently safe, is easy to store and transport, is perceived by the general population to be safe, and is affordable.